The small towns in the province of Posen became a nineteenth-century intellectual reservoir that fed German modernization. A new cultural interface had arisen where the Jewish tradition of text interpretation could interact with Enlightenment thinking and the new Bildung ideal in the spirit of von Humboldt.

European Humanities University, EHU, is a Belarusian university in exile that educates Belarusians in an academic environment that encourages the development of independent views. Students run the risk of arrest and interrogation by the Belarusian police. Some can no longer return to Belarus during school breaks.